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Sure. If you do the old non-5MWD balance, you get attrition over a day. Hitting 0 HP then happens because you went into a hard fight with far less than max HP. In 5e, the daily HP contribution (2 short rests) of a L 5 fighter with 16 con is (6+3)*5+4 + 3d10+15 + 5d10+15 = 123 HP, with a...

A huge amount of the "0 HP yoyo" is because DMs aren't vicious at 0 HP. In a typical encounter, someone at 0 HP can be dead before anyone else gets to heal them. Instead, we have DMs that build super-deadly 5 minute encounter day fights to be "exciting", and then treat PCs with kid gloves once...

I find that is an example of subclass features that work better outside of that subclass than they do within the subclass. I tend to make houserules that go the other direction. I don't mind some synergy, but if you get an 2nd BA feature in your subclass, you should also get awesome BA uses...

Good DMs create, great DMs steal. So what can I steal from BG3? Weapons: Unseen Menance has a nice mechanic. You get advantage on attacks ... until you miss. It is 2 rounds by the game; I might make it take an action to regain the feature, just to get rid of bookkeeping. Club of Hill Giant...

Having "individual plot hooks" that can be attached to PCs or to NPCs for an adventure seems like a great idea. You could even map them to the base game backgrounds. Like, "if you have a Urchin in your party" how to connect a personal plothook storyline to that given character. Then, have...

I mean, the game and the GM could choose to reward certain goals, and be explicit about it. You can ignore the mechanics of Settlers of Catan, and change your goal to be "preserve as much of the island as possible from exploitation". But the game mechanics fight you on it. If you "choose"...

That could be easy. Suppose you offer XP if someone befriends an NPC, has a NPC they have befriended die, make everyone at the table laugh. Hand out bonds and backgrounds, and associate those bonds and backgrounds with goals - and grant XP when you reach those pre-assigned goals.

Yes. So do interrupt attacks, conditional stuff, complex modifiers, etc. By focusing on DPS (or effectiveness per second) instead of DPR (or effectiveness per round), you can prevent fights that take extra table time. And spells quite often take more time to resolve than attacks; the time it...

No, Damage per Second is damage per real life second at the table. This exists outside of CRPG and MMOs. This is highly meaningful, as the experience of table top role playing games is actual people at actual tables spending actual time. You'll note I go on to talk about it not being only...

Making intimidation "I seem impressive" works great. Persuasion - "Be a good chap and listen to this deal" Deception - "This lie is true, clearly" Intimidation - "I'm an impressive person, you should show deference" One way to use Intimidation is a threat, but far from the only one. Getting...

This is the "damage per second" problem that bogged down high level 4e combat. Your damage per round could keep up or diverge, but quite often this came at the sacrifice of damage per second - table time it took to resolve something. Being brutal about damage per second when designing features...

From my perspective, a 30% different in damage output isn't that large. Especially if the damage looks different. Two characters, one doing 30% more damage than the other, are peers. So, the damage model that "doesn't work" -- where we have a 5 minute adventuring day, and the wizard does 30%...

So, the world contains things PCs can do that are suicidal. Like charging a nearly endless horde of orcs. What do you do when players choose to do something suicidal? You could run the fight and watch the PCs die. You could veto the player's choice to make their PCs act suicidally. Like...

Sorry, why new DM here. I'll assume it is new DM time because the DM did something inappropriate. Is it inappropriate for a hostile horde of 1000 orcs to exist? Is it inappropriate for a DM to say, when players decide to charge a horde of 1000 orcs, to say "you all die"? Is it inappropriate...

Gritty Rests mean that the players lose the "chapter" if they run out of resources. Some adventures are single chapter (single adventuring day) and a week break ends them. Others are longer, with a week break baked in. When you build such a one-chapter adventure, your "budget" is an...

The only thing good about the 19-20 crit range feature is making some unexpected moments a bit more likely. Mechanically, it doesn't do a very good job of, well, killing or hurting stuff. The 19-20 range instead of 20 means that 5% of swings do an extra set of weapon damage dice. We'll be...

I have seen that disparity between an unoptimized Ranger and an optimized Ranger. Between an unoptimized Fighter and an optimized Barbarian. Between an unoptimized Cleric and an optimized Bard. How is it that people seem to play on tables where everyone is in the same ballpark optimization...

No, I am not. "I memorize and cast animate objects and cast animate undead" is not an optimized wizard. The wizard has dozens of build choices -- more, if you count each attribute point. I picked two build choices (two spells known) that typically are dirt cheap as purchased ad-ons (learned...

I am just comparing optimization to optimization. My point is that more optimization is more damage. +7 as the fighter is using SS/GWM to get those damage numbers. And I am comparing nearly unoptimized (pick 1 or 2 spells) vs quite optimized (most of build and gear choices dedicated to it...

That ... isn't true. There are a myriad of wizard builds that put out insane damage in a single round. There is the entire magic missile nuke trick - MM does damage simultaneously, so it is one damage roll, then you boost that damage roll and fire off a ... large ... number of magic missiles...